love, critters, and halloween

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painting the walking dead

So after a night of obsessing over my zombie’s mouth, I decided that using her original lips was the better option. And as soon as I cut the latex to expose her mouth? I regretted my decision, because it left a pretty obvious edge that I couldn’t hide.

…Moving on! I decided to start with a base colour of grey for her skin, then a layer of green, then a drybrushed layer of off yellow. I then chose to give her a secondary level of exposed muscle, with a few bits of exposed bone. For the muscle layer, I went with two shades of red followed by a diluted wash of black. (I used craft paint for all of this.)

Stage One:

Stage Two (or, Oh Chickie I’m Not Sure What To Do Next):

Stage Three:

A sign of true love (as well as the best husband ever): Bones not only didn’t complain that I was working at the dining room table, he also cooked dinner and brought it to me while I was working. ❤

Side note: No matter how much they beg, do NOT feed your zombie table scraps.

“Please? Just a nibble?”

I started working on her hands as well before calling it a day. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be working with actual hand-looking hands! I used to work for a haunt that tried to use gloves in lieu of sculpted hands on their figures and IMNSO you can always tell that you’re looking at empty gloves. If you’re building your own figures, keep on the lookout for hands you can salvage off other props. These hands in particular are nowhere near new – the latex at the wrists is a little rough – but they’ll work for this project just fine. I almost didn’t want to paint them because they sure do look aged/dead, but they don’t match any of my other materials and trying to paint everything else to match this might not work so well. So! They got a base coat of grey before Bones and I went out to visit some local haunts to get some more spooky inspiration.